The first wave of homesickness hit on Saturday. I made the mistake of downloading an episode of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me." For those of you who don't listen to NPR, also known as National Public Radio, this is a news quiz show of absurd proportions. I listened to this show religiously in the states and would like to pick the addiction back up, but it amazed me when I heard that they were broadcasting from Kingsbury Hall in Salt Lake. I cheered but I was anguished at the same time. I made the roommates suffer through countless episodes of this radio show in the SLC and now the actual show was in Utah? And I had just left Utah? No, this couldn't be. You may think I'm getting a little too worked up about this, but the hard core NPRers know what I'm talking about.

On a completely different note, I just now noticed how many English schools there are around my area. I had written to my friend Dave that there are four things that are abundant in Korea: convenience stores (they have convenience stores next to convenience stores here), restaurants, bars and Koreans. I'm going to expand that list to five things including English schools. There's a building close to my house that has five different academies in it. I noticed a sign today that said: English Language Hospital, and I thought, "That's odd, it doesn't look like a hospital." It took a little deciphering but I eventually realized that was a name for one of the schools. The name made me wonder as to the nature of this school. Did they actually help Koreans with chronic cases of labial consonant mispronunciation or acute past-reflective tense disorder? I can see two English teachers diagnosing a patient that was just wheeled in:

"What do you think he has?"
"Looking at his chart I'd say he has little to no "r, d, l" sound recognition and that his writing skills have taken a dramatic decline.'
"What do you recommend?"
"A strict regimen of nasal-labial vocalization accompanied by three sets of worksheets every two days."
At this point the patient starts to spout out rapid streams of Konglish.
"My God! He's hemorrhaging!"

Maybe I can make this into the new ER.